101 - Last Year at Marienbad, 1961, France/Italy. Dir. Alain Resnais.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

101 - Last Year at Marienbad, 1961, France/Italy. Dir. Alain Resnais.

We discovered Alain Resnais two days ago with his documentary Night and Fog (1956), made when he was a young, unknown editor who had directed some short films.

Night and Fog put Resnais on the map.  It was a difficult, honest film about the details of the concentration camps.  It included graphic footage, which was very difficult for people to view, including the filmmakers.  Yet nearly everyone understood that it was important.

A few years later, in 1959, Resnais came out with his first feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour, a cleverly conceived study of memory and forgetting, guilt and forgiveness, infidelity and love.  A French actress goes to Hiroshima to make a movie about peace, and while their she meets a Japanese man.  They discuss their respective experiences with guilt and memory and forgetting as they grow closer to one another.

Like Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour begins with graphic footage of survivors of the bomb, as well as reenactments made by the local museum.  It then moves into different territory as it looks at the couple's relationship and at her memories in particular, told in flashback, of her own pain.

Now we have Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a different kind of film.  It takes place at a chateau.  If you are not exactly familiar with that term, let us say that it is larger than a mansion.  You could say it is what the richest people built when they stopped building castles.  In America, we have the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina.  In Europe, chateaus are more prevalent.

This film is highly stylized and unusual.  The writer and director planned every detail, from camera angle to camera movement to description of interiors.  The camera moves in long tracking shots looking at ceilings while we hear a voiceover which is difficult to decipher.  The words describe the location but they state more than that.  They frequently repeat themselves with minor changes in a theme and variation.  The people stand as still as mannequins and the move like robots.

The production looks beautiful.

The plot is quite simple.

A man named X approaches a woman named A at a party.  He says that they met last year in Marienbad.  She says they did not.  A man named M, who might be her husband, plays games with the man named X and beats him.

The film moves back and forth in space and time, and scenes repeat themselves with changes, just as the dialogue does.

It is a kind of surreal film, a kind of stream of consciousness.

Is it like a Faulkner novel?

Is it like a Dali painting.

This one may take a few watches before making a decision.

The critics were split on it.  Some praised it highly.  Others derided it.

Check it out and decide for yourself.